Marisabidilla: n., Span. A know-it-all girl with an answer for everything.
Marissabidilla: n., Amer-Span. The blog of a girl with an answer for some things
and a question for most things.

Monday, December 26, 2011

Vaclav Havel's Ethical Politics

In the wee hours of December 18, 2003, I was finishing up a research paper on Vaclav Havel for my high-school English class. Eight years later, in the wee hours of December 18, 2011, I came home from an evening of theater- and party-going to read the breaking news headline that Mr. Havel had passed away. For obvious reasons, Havel was one of my heroes, and I am working on a new blog post in response to his death. In the meantime, though, I'm posting my old research paper. I went back and reread it this week and, considering that I wrote it as a teenager, I still think it's a pretty good piece of work. The last paragraph, especially, stands as a fitting memorial to Havel's legacy. But because it's long and because it's from my high school days, I've put most of it after the jump.

Differing Reactions To Václav Havel’s Ethical Politics

by Marissa Skudlarek, 2003

In
addition to his role as the first post-Communist president of both
Czechoslovakia (from 1989-1992) and the Czech Republic (1993-2003), Václav
Havel has been an award-winning absurdist playwright, a dissident activist, a
political prisoner, and an instrumental figure in Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet
Revolution.” Indeed, his help in winning
Czechoslovakia’s independence from the Soviet satellite system launched him to
the presidency. A further factor was
that he had become much admired—by both his compatriots and the Western
intellectual community—for the many essays he had written summarizing his
thoughts on the ideal role of politics. Seeing the post-totalitarian Communist
government as full of lies and lacking legitimacy, he encouraged the
Czechoslovak people to “live in the truth,” performing morally obligated acts
of civil disobedience. This ethical
perspective on politics led the Czechoslovaks to believe that Havel would be
their ideal first president. Yet while
leading Western figures continued to admire Havel’s morally-based policies,
these same principles caused him to lose popularity in his native land.

As a dissident in the 1970s, Havel began developing the
ethical perspective that would have such a bearing on his future career. In his famous essay “The Power of the
Powerless,” Havel introduced his phrase “living in truth” (55), by which he
meant rejecting hollow Communist ideology and instead following one’s
conscience despite the consequences.
According to Havel, if everyone, even the supposedly “powerless,” lives
in the truth, society will improve for the better. In fact, he perceived a “deep moral crisis in
society,” which could only be remedied by this “attempt to regain one’s own
sense of responsibility” (“Power of the Powerless” 62). After sweeping away the false Communist
regime and becoming president of Czechoslovakia, Havel continued to emphasize
the idea that acting morally and responsibly is the best way to create a
liberal democracy.

Without commonly shared and widely entrenched moral
values and obligations, neither the law, nor democratic government, nor even
the market economy will function properly.
They are all marvelous products of the human spirit […]—assuming the
human spirit wants these mechanisms to serve it, respects them, believes in
them, guarantees them, and is willing, if necessary, to fight for them or make
sacrifices to them. (Summer Meditations 19)

Havel believes that this widespread moral foundation will
cause “civil society,” that is, public cultural organizations (Stroehlein) to
flourish, cementing the ties between government and the individual.

In Havel’s view, the politician must assume the same
values, such as “living in the truth,” that have been set for the average
citizen. Applying these principles to
the political world involves what Havel calls “anti-political politics,”
described as “politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of
cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the useful, but politics as one of
the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives […], as practical morality,
as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our
fellow humans” (“Politics and Conscience” 155).
A large part of anti-political politics (also called non-political
politics) involves rationally considering issues, rather than blindly following
political parties or factions. When
Czechoslovakia was a one-party Communist state, Havel realized that “[shedding]
the burden of traditional political categories and habits and [opening] oneself
up fully to the world of human existence and then [drawing] political
conclusions only after having analyzed it […] is not only politically more
realistic but […] from the point of view of an ‘ideal state of affairs,’
politically more promising as well” (“The Power of the Powerless” 70). Havel carried this belief with him when he
became president, promoting anti-political politics after becoming disgusted
with the partisanship of post-Communist Czechoslovakia (Summer Meditations
2-3). Furthermore, Havel sees
politicians as having an awesome responsibility: not solely to serve their
constituencies, or even their countries, but the whole world. “Through intrigue one may become prime
minister,” Havel acknowledges, “but that will be the extent of one’s success;
one can hardly improve the world that way” (Summer Meditations 6). Indeed, Havel agreed to be president of
Czechoslovakia only after realizing that he had the responsibility to live up
to his ideals by putting his political theories into practice (Summer
Meditations xvi). He resolved anew
to “live in the truth,” ignored advice to be more manipulative or stern or
partisan (Summer Meditations 7), and held to his ideals of ethical,
non-political, politics.

Intellectuals
from many Western countries have admired Havel’s views, lauding his political
theory or expressing solidarity with his dissident activities. The late German writer Heinrich Böll, winner
of the 1972 Nobel Prize, wrote an essay demonstrating a near worship of Havel,
even claiming that “a Christ is speaking in [Letters to Olga, Havel’s letters from prison]” (211). In some respects, Böll appears so captivated
by Havel that he cannot even explain why he admires him so: “If an objection is
raised against Havel to the effect that ‘this’—resistance, endurance, and
hope—‘serves no purpose,’ then my reply will be quite simply that it does in
fact have a purpose” (211). Böll’s
reaction, though, accurately reflects the adulation that Havel has received
from the international intellectual community.
For example, Swedish literary figure Harry Järv has positively compared
Havel’s civil disobedience to Antigone and Thoreau (Järv 234-235); and
playwrights as varied as the American Arthur Miller, the Irish-French Samuel
Beckett, and the Czech-British Tom Stoppard have all written works dedicated to
Havel, as a gesture of support during his difficult dissident years (Miller 263;
Beckett 199; Stoppard 278). Western
politicians, also, have found much to esteem in Havel. The American presidents Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush have even been described as “tongue-tied
and awe-struck in the presence of someone who actually fought communism and
lived to tell about it” (Welch). At a
joint press conference with Havel, Bush gushed to the Czech President, “Your
life has shown that a person who dedicates himself to freedom can change the
course of a nation and change the course of history […] I’m proud to call you
friend” (“Press Conference”).

Mainstream
American publications, while acknowledging Havel’s flaws, also maintain this
admiring tone. In an article originally
published in Vanity Fair, writer Stephen Schiff describes Havel as “sort
of European Gandhi: shy and selfless, yet insuperably stubborn; seemingly
egoless, yet devoid of moral doubt; cunning and even manipulative, but never
toward his own personal ends; conscience-driven, but never condemnatory of
those who aren’t” (78). Although Schiff
gently prods Havel for concentrating on improving foreign policy as he let
domestic problems flourish (76), he often gives the impression of being
fascinated by Havel. The New York
Times has also joined in the appreciation, publishing a glowing editorial
in support of Havel’s ethical politics when he left office in February
2003. It called Havel “an exceptional
individual moral authority […] [who] showed us that speaking honestly and
deeply when you are expected merely to express platitudes brings its own
political authority. Czechs and the rest
of us are better off because of him” (“Vaclav Havel Takes His Leave”). The editorial noted that under Havel’s
ethical rule, the Czech Republic has achieved such positive things as a
multiparty democratic system, a free press, and an invitation to join the
European Union. Yet it also admitted
that Havel had problems maintaining his popularity among Czechs, “in part
because he continued to remind his compatriots that their newfound democracy
depended on their everyday moral vigilance” (“Vaclav Havel Takes His
Leave”). The editorial thus makes clear
that both the warm non-Czech view of Havel and the more ambivalent reaction he
faces from his compatriots are due to his moral perspective on politics.

Not every Western
intellectual admires Havel’s ethical standpoint, though. Noam Chomsky, “arguably the most important
intellectual alive,” according to The New York Times (quoted in “Noam
Chomsky – Wikipedia”), has made comments demonstrating a vehement dislike for
Havel’s ideas. Havel’s 1990 address to
the United States Congress, in which he praised the United States for its
democratic tradition, called it “a defender of freedom” and exhorted it to
fulfill its role as the world’s one superpower in an ethical and responsible
fashion (The Art of the Impossible 10-20), won a very positive reaction
from both Congress and the media. Yet in
one of his letters, Chomsky takes a completely opposing stance, calling this
“awed response” “one of the most illuminating examples of the total and
complete intellectual and moral corruption of Western culture” (Chomsky). Not only does he think that the idea of
morality and responsibility in politics is trite, but also he finds Havel a
reprehensible, hypocritical flatterer.
In Chomsky’s worldview, American imperialism has caused more suffering
than Soviet totalitarianism ever did; he calls the Soviet satellite states
“practically a paradise” by comparison.
He notes that the United States would not punish Havel if he told the
“truth” (that is, Chomsky’s view that America is a threat to world peace),
wondering why Havel thus feels compelled to “lie.” Havel’s “flattery” of the United States thus
causes Chomsky to conclude that “by every conceivable standard, the performance
of Havel, Congress, the media, and […] the Western intellectual community at
large are on a moral and intellectual level that is vastly below that of Third
World peasants and Stalinist hacks—not an unusual discovery” (Chomsky). While Chomsky’s hatred of Havel’s ideas is a
harsh perspective from an important figure, it has done little, if anything, to
sway the favorable opinion of Havel held by the Western intellectual community.

However, the Czech people
generally seem to have a more ambivalent impression of Havel for one of two
reasons, both relating to his ethical politics.
Either they hold him to such high moral standards that they become
disillusioned when he becomes involved in less pure political or personal business;
or they believe Havel is too “non-political” to be an effective leader. Havel himself has acknowledged the first
criticism: in typically self-deprecating fashion, he titled a collection of his
presidential speeches and writings The Art of the Impossible: Politics as
Morality in Practice, and many of the texts in this volume deal with the
“impossible” task of applying his ethical politics to everyday political
reality. In one especially illuminating
speech, which he delivered at New York University in 1991, Havel admits,

For years I criticized practical politics
as no more than a technique in the struggle for power […] Destiny […] played a strange joke on me,
as if it were telling me […]: Since you think you’re so smart, now is your
chance to show everyone you have ever criticized the right way to do things […]
And so, not surprisingly, I am now in a rather unenviable position. All my political activities, and perhaps all
the domestic and foreign policies pursued by Czechoslovakia as well, are being
examined under a microscope I once constructed myself without knowing where it
would lead. (82-83)

At
the time Havel spoke these words, he had already weathered a few political
scandals, but had not lost massive amounts of his early popularity. Yet this speech well predicted what was to
happen: upon learning that their idealistic president was not perfect, the
Czechs would delight in turning against him.

For
example, on the personal front, Havel was widely criticized for remarrying less
than a year after his first wife, Olga, died of cancer. Olga Havlová was (and remains) a highly
respected figure among Czechs for her own dissident past, steadfast support of
Havel, charitable work, and no-nonsense attitude (“Olga Havlova” and “Czechs
Remember Olga Havlova”). Furthermore,
Havel’s second wife, Dagmar, was a leggy blonde actress who had once played a
topless vampire in a hit movie (Greene).
When Havel was in the hospital for an emergency tracheotomy, Dagmar
noticed he was asphyxiating and saved his life by calling a doctor—then
promptly ruined her reputation again by summoning a faith healer. People found crass not only that Havel
married Dagmar so soon after both Olga’s death and his own near-death
experience, but also that he justified it by claiming that Olga wanted him to
remarry (Keane 481). Dagmar was widely
believed to have ill effects on Havel’s presidency, not only because he acted
embarrassingly “besotted” (Keane 482), but because as First Lady she acted like
a diva, making unreasonable, ambitious demands and diverting his attention. Havel’s steadfast defense of her only made
him more unpopular among Czechs (Keane 480-484).

Havel had struggled through one
of his most major political scandals during his first term as president—one of
the only times he ever came near being called “unethical.” Havel had appointed Richard Sacher the
Minister of the Interior, hoping that he would stop the Ministry’s widespread
destruction of important secret police files.
Instead, Sacher collaborated with former Communists by refusing to
reform the Ministry, making a private collection of files, and going through
the files in the hopes of finding scandalous information about Parliament
members. Czechoslovaks knew that these
activities could lead to blackmail, and worried that Havel might be taking
files from Sacher so that information contained therein would not damage his
regime. It is still not known to what
extent, if any, Havel was complicit in what came to be known as “Sachergate.” According to Keane, “the only reason
[Sachergate] did not bring down the President of the country was because, at the time, Havel’s
potential critics around the Castle [the Czech President’s official residence]
held fast to the view that ‘solidarity’ with the Castle was vital if the ancien régime was to be defeated” (429). Havel found a solution by asking all
Parliament members with names contained in the files to resign. Unfortunately, that led to an even more
ethically questionable practice: lustration (Keane 428-431).

Lustration, a word deriving from
the Latin for “to purify” (Keane 431), stems from a more general issue faced by
the Czechoslovaks: what to do about the Communist party and its former
members. After the Velvet Revolution of
1989, the Party was not officially banned, and in fact, retained much of its huge
assets (Whipple 61). Havel and his
tolerant, ethical perspective played a large part in this: he did not believe
that the Communist party should be treated like scapegoats. Although he made many speeches lambasting the
former Communist regime for what it did to Czechoslovakia, he also implied that
every Czechoslovak was partially responsible for Communism’s effects. “We
had all become used to the totalitarian system and accepted it as an
unalterable fact of life, and thus we helped to perpetuate it” (“New Year’s
Address to the Nation” 4), was a typical comment, once again deriving from
Havel’s belief that society as a whole must “live in the truth” if any change
is to occur. He insisted that “[The
Party] ought to have the good conscience to dissolve itself and start
afresh—something it has yet to do. The
revolution is to proceed by absolutely legal means” (quoted in Whipple 42), but
six months after the revolution, the government confiscated all Party property
(Whipple 61). However, the Communist Party
still had the largest membership of any Czech political party, and won second
place in the June 1990 elections (Whipple 62).
It gradually lost influence—entirely through Havel’s “legal means”—and
is no longer a social force today.

However,
a more difficult issue still faced Czechoslovaks: how to deal with former
high-ranking members of the Party itself, especially bureaucrats and
secret-police informers. There
was a large popular push to exclude them altogether from public life, although
the government was reluctant to do this because Communists were the only
citizens experienced at administration (Wilson 25). Havel continued to take the ethical “high
road,” but instead of admiring his policies, the Czechoslovaks saw them as
weak. This provided an opening for rabid
anti-Communists, such as Václav Klaus, Havel’s Finance Minister, to push the
Lustration Act through the legislature (Keane 432; Wilson 26). Since the act did pass by only a slim margin
(Keane 432), Havel’s views were not completely ignored by the legislature. Still, he did not retain enough influence to
stop this “most ethically dubious and politically controversial purging
legislation in all of central and eastern Europe” (Keane 431), which targeted
over a million Czechoslovak citizens. (At
this time, the nation only contained about 15 million people.) It went after Communists who held political
power at district level or above, former secret-police officers, and those
accused of collaborating with them; forbidding members of these groups to hold
high-level administrative jobs in the government, military, education, or large
companies. All people who sought one of
these jobs, in fact, needed “clearance” from Minister of the Interior before
they could be hired. (Keane 432).

As soon as the law was passed,
there was an instant outcry. Many people
did agree with Havel that the Communists should not be made scapegoats. Others accused Václav Klaus and other architects
of the law of using to further their own political ambitions. The most stinging criticism was that although
the Lustration Act attempted to prosecute the secret police, it only ended up
giving them more power. It would use the
secret police’s records to determine guilt, even though everybody knew that the
unscrupulous Communist police would extort false confessions or fabricate
evidence (Keane 432-433). Havel was
distraught by the atmosphere of guilt, fear, and suspicion that the Lustration
Act caused in Czechoslovakia, and vehemently denounced it to foreigners
(“Speech at New York University” 85).
Yet domestically, he was less vocal: he conceded that definite criminals
ought to be punished, and refused to hear individual cases. According to Keane, this signified that Havel
no longer believed in the ideal of absolute truth, but had finally learned the
politically expedient “value of tact” (436).
Indeed, Havel had chosen the non-dissident option. He confessed to a moral opposition to the
Lustration Act, yet chose to sign it so as not to enter into open conflict with
Parliament. To appease his conscience,
he did recommend that Parliament amend the bill, yet still knew that Parliament
might not make any of the changes that he suggested (“Speech at New York
University” 86). He concluded the speech
by saying that he had finally learned that “the way of a truly moral politics
is neither simple nor easy” (86).

Havel’s ethical perspective on
politics would be further tested by his conflict with Václav Klaus, who at
various times during Havel’s presidency served as Finance Minister and Prime
Minister. Like Havel, Klaus was a former
intellectual and writer, and a leading figure of the Czechoslovakian revolution
(Ash 58). Interestingly, over twenty
years before they would come to represent the two sides of Czech politics,
these men shared similar political views.
Klaus revealed, in an
interview with Reason magazine, “[Havel and I]
served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also
interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became
friends” (“No Third Way Out”).
Furthermore, Havel and Klaus initially had the same goals for the Czech
Republic: a well-orchestrated transition to democracy and a free-market
economy. But while Havel interpreted
“well-orchestrated” to mean “smooth,” Klaus interpreted it to mean “quick,”
even if dishonesty and corruption resulted (Ash 69). Some of Klaus’s now-legendary statements,
such as “There is no dirty money” (quoted by Stroehlein) reflected his
attitude. These hardnosed sentiments fit
the mood of the country, which rapidly followed Klaus’s vision and became a
free-market economy “more unregulated than anything in the West”
(Stroehlein). Rejecting Havel’s ideas of
collective ethical responsibility, the Czechs sided with the “other Václav” and
rushed headlong into market reform.

Another major Havel-Klaus dispute dealt with the role of
political parties. Colored by their
experiences with the one-party Communist system, Havel and many other Czech
intellectuals were deeply suspicious of organized political parties
(Stroehlein). They had formed an
organization called “Civic Forum” to help achieve independence from the Soviet
system, and Havel hoped that this coalition would remain a social force, as
opposed to becoming a narrow faction.
Klaus, on the other hand, wanted to develop an agenda for Civic Forum,
especially so that it could achieve its economic goals (Stroehlein). Eventually, Klaus’s branch of Civic Forum
became a strong new political party, while Havel’s supporters were left
stranded, unable to compete with Klaus’s organized movement. Even Westerners have criticized Havel for
such strong opposition to political parties.
Timothy Garton Ash, for example, suggests that had Havel spearheaded
another movement, regardless of its partisan nature, he would have built up a
power base, rather than seeing his influence wane. Although he remained sufficiently popular to
serve as Czech president for two terms, this meant little in the long run
because the office has such limited powers (66). Havel and Klaus continued to duel, which
ended up “[underlying] almost every crisis and every major policy decision made
since 1989” (Wilson 29). Eventually, it
seemed to Czechs that these men were irrevocably opposed, always making thinly
veiled jabs at each other in the press.
There appeared to be no issue on which they could agree, and Czechs came
to see their country’s politics as solely a clash between these two figures
(Ash 68). Klaus was eventually forced to
resign because of a scandal (Wilson 29), yet he gained power once again and, to
many people’s surprise, became Czech president when Havel’s term ended. More importantly, Havel’s refusal to
collaborate with his own Prime Minister—a refusal that impeded domestic politics—showed
that he had fallen prey to the factionalism that he had once so vehemently
opposed.

Furthermore, Czechs continued to have difficulty with
Havel’s ethical politics, which they found “impractical, overly intellectual,
and out of touch” (Stroehlein). Even
Czechs who saw Havel’s good points acknowledged that his ethical politics did
not always function as they would like.
Perhaps the best expression of this attitude comes from Lubos Beniak, a
newspaper editor. He has called Havel
“exceptional” and “a very honest man,” yet also admitted,

The support [for Havel] is not ecstatic like it was
before […], but it’s still there. You
know, sometimes, as a politician, he has made mistakes. But his mistakes all come from the same
thing: he sometimes doesn’t respect the realities of life. And it’s very difficult to say that this is
bad, because […] if he respected the realities of life, he wouldn’t be
president today. (Quoted by Schiff, 79)

The ambivalence of Beniak’s statement—the way it mixes
respect of Havel’s ideas and resignation to their impracticality—characterizes
the Czech attitude toward their former president. Despite Havel’s flaws, scandals, and fights
with Klaus, there were still long lines at Prague bookstores in 1994, when he
published a volume of his speeches (Critical Essays 90). At the very least, these lines signify that
Czech citizens were curious about the ethical politics that Havel presents in
many of these speeches. Unlike Western
intellectuals and politicians, who admire Havel in sometimes lofty terms,
Czechs do judge Havel according to higher moral standards, or see his ideals as
unachievable dreams. However, they
retain an essential admiration for their president and his ethical politics—politics
that, at the very least, were able to defeat the lies of the Communists.

Beckett, Samuel. “Catastrophe.” Contained in Václav Havel: Living in
Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus
Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan
Vladislav. London: Faber and Faber,
1990. 199-203

Böll, Heinrich. “Courtesy Towards God.” Contained in Václav
Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the
Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel.
Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber and
Faber, 1990. 204-212

Chomsky, Noam. “Letter to Alexander Cockburn,” March 30,
1990. Contained in The Golden Age Is
In Us. Alexander Cockburn. Verso, 1995.
149-151. Accessed at
http://monkeyfist.com/ChomskyArchive/essays/havel_html, December 1, 2003.

Havel, Václav. Speech at New York University, October 27,
1991. Contained in The Art of the
Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. Václav Havel, trans. Paul Wilson et al. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. 82-86.

Havel, Václav, trans. E.
Kohák and R. Scruton. “Politics and
Conscience.” Contained in Václav
Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the
Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel.
Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber
and Faber, 1990. 136-157

Havel, Václav, trans. Paul
Wilson. “The Power of the
Powerless.” Contained in Václav
Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the
Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel.
Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber
and Faber, 1990. 36-122

Järv, Harry. “Citizen Versus
State.” Contained in Václav Havel:
Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the Award of
the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel.
Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber
and Faber, 1990. 232-244

Keane,
John. Václav Havel: A Political
Tragedy in Six Acts. London:
Bloomsbury, 1999.

Miller, Arthur. “I Think About You a Great Deal.” Contained
in Václav Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the
Occasion of the Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. 263-265

Stoppard, Tom. “Introduction (to
The Memorandum).” Contained in Václav
Havel: Living in Truth: Twenty-two Essays Published on the Occasion of the
Award of the Erasmus Prize to Václav Havel.
Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber
and Faber, 1990. 278-280

2 comments:

Well, there are precedents. In Spain the aristocrat Ángel de Saavedra (3rd Duke of Rivas) is famous for his play Don Álvaro o la fuerza del sino (1835) in the line of La forza del destino. A moderate liberal in politics he was President of the Council (Prime Minister) in 1854 under the Queen Isabel II, but only for two days! Times were rough in spanish politics.Congratulations for your essay and looking forward your reading lists for 2011